Monthly Archives: February 2014

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Every week the staff of readme comes together to discuss current events on campus, in the U.S. and around the world. Then we attempt to make it funny. Sometimes we even succeed! We look at various news sources to find material. Often, we’ll find gems of headlines that we can’t even hope to make funnier. Today we’d like to share some of them with you.

Fletcher Jameson won the Women’s Womanhood Coalition award for Best at Womanhood last week. The sudden win cast the event into a stunned and ecstatic jumble of women. All of them were scrambling for a picture of Jameson kissing his partner.

While the women were busy imagining Jameson and his partner in bed, readme slipped in for an interview with the honorary woman who has been noted by his female companions to be great for Friday night chick-flick marathons since he always knows when to tell them to stop eating the fucking ice cream, you slutty slob. “He’s not mean. He’s just sassy.”

“What other men, even other gay men, don’t understand” Jameson told readme “is that womanhood is really very simple.” He beamed, holding the trophy which was oddly oval in shape. “Women really don’t even understand themselves.” He said, playfully slapping the ass of the announcer. “Sexual harassment is okay if you’re gay.” He laughed. “Doesn’t mean anything.”

“What women really want” he explained, “is for someone to tell them why no one loves them. I mean, either they’re slutty or they’re fat or they don’t know how to dress. Ain’t no woman who know how to dress better than a gay man” he continued in a voice imitated what seemed to be a particularly constipated black woman. But cultural appropriation is okay when you’re a gay dude.

“This thing kinda looks like a disgusting vag, doesn’t it” Jameson said inspecting his newly earned trophy with a disgruntled look on his face. “Kidding! Kidding!” he said holding the trophy a little farther from his body than strictly necessary. “It’s okay for gay guys to say that, see? Because it doesn’t cause the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes or hatred of the female body like when straight men say it.

Jameson left arm in arm with his partner, whispering sweetly into his ear, “I’m so glad I’m with you honey. Can you imagine having to date a woman! I don’t know how straight guys do it!”.

Hey, Ivy, I just wanted to get your input here as editor-in-chef. So I was making the new budget to submit to the JFC and I can’t help but notice a few…discrepancies in the old one I was hoping you could clear up.

First off, there’s the issue of how we’re allocating our budget. I kind of assumed we’d spend a little more money on, you know, actually printing the readmes, but it turns out most of it goes to the ‘Seducing the Tartan’ budget. I always thought we were just joking about that…also I’ve looked at some of the purchases we’ve made from that budget and I don’t think the kind of ‘seduction’ you’re thinking of is legal. Like, at all. That’s not a ‘budget’ thing, just a ‘thought you should maybe know’ thing.

We should probably also correct the typos in the rest of the budget, you know, so it looks more professional. For instance, there’s one bit that says ‘money for bear traps’ when it should read ‘money for bear caps’. At least, I hope so. Also, ‘group bondage’ should read ‘group bonding’ and printers take toner with a ‘t’. A few other things the budget doesn’t seem to get: the word ‘deductible’ does not refer to a hat that makes you look like Sherlock Holmes, ‘a comically-oversized net’ does not count as a ‘Recruitment expense’, and they are called ‘print jobs’. Print jobs.

One last comment, I noticed there’s a section of the budget allotted for ‘People Food’, which is fine except that there is also a section allotted for ‘Food People’. On a completely unrelated note, Ivy, I was wondering if there was any specific reason why your full title is ‘editor-in-chef’ instead of ‘editor-in-chief’. Just curious.

But I guess those are all long-term revisions. We can get to them later, probably. The really urgent thing is that based on this budget, we no longer have any money. If we try to charge anything to our account, we’ll get hit with an overdraft fee and that’ll totally fuck up our budget for next year, so if you could get back to me before we print the February 19th issue, that would be great. I can’t even imagine the clusterfuck we’d have to deal with if we printed without taking care of this whole budget thing first. So, yeah, talk to me soon about that, please.

Also about the Food People thing. I’d really like to be reassured on that score.

Well, it’s that time again, folks. Time for all countries in the world to unite in the spirit of competition and see who can find the juiciest scandal within the morass of the Sochi Winter Olympics.

The furor began months before the games, due to Russia’s recently implemented anti-gay laws. What exactly counts as “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships”? Does the Germans’ rainbow gear promote non-traditional sexual relations? Should Google be fined for it’s gay pride logo on the opening day? Am I allowed to wear my tie-dye?

Speaking of opening day, that ceremony was awesome. My favorite part was when the snowflakes came down and opened up into the Olympic symbol– oh wait, one didn’t open. They were the almost-Olympic rings, with an asterisk. The footnote could have read: “Work in Progress.”

The rest of the ceremony went well though. Except for the bit at the end, where Irina Rodnina lit the Olympic flame. Late last year, she tweeted a (photoshopped) picture of Obama chewing while a banana was offered. There is something about African Americans and bananas that just doesn’t sit right.

Few reports have made it out as to how the games are actually going. Half the reporters sent to Sochi have been unintentionally locked into their bathrooms/bedrooms/hotels, and don’t have the bobsled training that allowed American athlete Johnny Quinn to break free. The other half are having trouble with stray dogs, which are hurriedly rushed out of sight before being given the “drinking” water.

Those reports we do get seem to be confused. “Well, I was sent under the impression that this was the winter Olympics, but maybe water-skiing is a new addition to the summer games?” one reporter remarked, sunbathing underneath a palm tree before the anti-gay police told him to put his shirt back on. The temperature has consistently been in the fifties and sixties, threatening the integrity of the snow and ice that are maybe just a little bit necessary for the events.

For most of the world, the Olympic Games give us a chance to join together in unison and gossip about whatever scandals come up. However, it is important to keep in mind that these issues that are laughable in the United States are just daily life in Russia. After the Olympics are done and gone, there will still be anti-gay laws. There will still be half-finished hotels and unclean water. The stray dogs will come back, or be killed, after the increased scrutiny is removed. And the dysfunctional government, run by strong-man Putin, will still be more worried about things like putting on the most expensive games in history instead of fixing any actual problems.

In struggles such as these, humanity sees itself transformed. Four years ago, the world rose together as one and we battled wave after wave of the invading North Korean imperialists. And even as we saw some of our closest allies fall before us, lost to the hordes of Kim Jung Un, we stood our ground firmly as a country. My fellow Americans, I both rejoice and grieve for the fate of our generation; we became fighters before our time; many others, martyrs.

Now, we are called on to become executioners. On Monday, February 17th, 2014, the United Nations authorized inquiry leader Michael to use a third and final WMD, this time targeted directly at the North Korean leader, with the intent of ending this war through force.

We do not take this decisions lightly. Time after time we have fought against the use of WMD’s. Like its namesake, Words of Maximum Deterrence have proved themselves of maximum efficiency, but with consequences just as extreme. In December 16th, of 2011 the United Nations launched its first WMD in the form of a disapproving letter. Only a day later, the abashed North Koreans issued a ceasefire – but at a cost. Kim Jong Il, whom the letter addressed, withdrew into a deep depression when he realized the error of his ways, and ultimately killed himself by dying of a massive heart attack. The UN’s second WMD ended in tragedy when it misfired and caused Kim Jong Un’s uncle to kill himself by firing squad. But in those regretful actions, there was hope; we were able to negotiate the release of twenty American POWs, all of whom have been returned to their communities and their families.

We understood the gravity of the situation then, we understood it on Monday, and we understand it now. But in times of need, the right thing to do is often also the hardest thing to do. Yes, Kim Jong Un will probably become so despondent he will kill himself as a result of this letter. But for the good of humanity, this WMD can bring about the end of a ruthless dictatorship, and that is something truly worth fighting for.

So you know that joke people tell each other, where somebody’s doing something vaguely annoying and you say that if you were to kill them for it ‘no jury would convict you’? Turns out, they won’t. Not if you’re in Florida and can claim self-defense, at least.Florida resident Michael Dunn was at a gas station one night when he was started an argument with four teenagers over how loudly they were allowed to blast their car’s stereo. And, hey, we’ve all been there. Where significantly fewer of us have been is the part where Dunn fired upon the SUV ten times, killing one teen, Jordan Davis, and endangering the rest. Dunn later claimed self-defense, saying Davis had threatened him with a shotgun that his friends had disposed of before the police began their investigation. readme sure as hell couldn’t see any parallels between this and any other murder cases that happened in the last year or so, especially once it found out that Davis and all his friends were young black males who had been listening to rap music when the shooting occurred.Perhaps because of these parallels which in no way exist between this shooting and that other one, the prosecution was skeptical of Dunn’s self-defense claim. The police turned up no evidence of this alleged shotgun, they said, and Dunn’s behavior after the shooting was suspiciously nonchalant given the circumstances. What’s more, Dunn’s own fiancée testified that he had never mentioned being threatened by Davis before shooting him. Because there’s absolutely no reason you’d want to inform your soon-to-be wife that the time you killed that one kid was actually self-defense and not murder. He was acting—to use the legal term—‘shifty as all hell’.The good news is that while Dunn was not actually convicted of murder, he was convicted on three counts of attempted murder with a minimum sixty-year sentence, and the jury did not acquit him of the murder either, so it is possible a subsequent jury will convict him of that, as well. But while a story about a dude in Florida being punished for killing an unarmed teenager is far more preferable than a story about a dude in Florida getting off scot free for killing an unarmed teenager, readme can’t help but think things would be way better off if dudes in Florida just stopped killing unarmed teenagers. Sure, it means the Florida media will no longer have any interesting news to cover, but readme thinks a few week-long editorials about how to cope with the humidity is worth not having to live in a constant state of lawless anarchy, don’t you agree?

In a plea for help, UPMC is calling on the general public to rally on March 3rd against the machinations of its greedy employees. For years, UPMC employees have been tormenting its employer – last November they had the audacity to exist as workers, a fact that had frustrated the company as they tried to acquire a non-profit status. In the end, UPMC’s lawyers pulled them through, claiming that: “The City of Pittsburgh has not, and cannot, identify a single person who is employed by or on the payroll of UPMC, the parent holding company.” The ruling was a great gain for the embattled $10 billion non-profit organization, which not only works tirelessly to avoid paying property taxes but also has apparently been needlessly paying its 62,000 “volunteers”.

In essence, the March 3rd rally is a “pick-me-up” for UPMC, who would appreciate an outcry of support after the controversy concerning the way it has treated its employees employed volunteers. As a case in point, the company was criticized even when it opened a food bank to aid its own struggling workers. Many detractors of the move (including more than a few ungrateful employees) whined that a food bank was “demeaning”, and that UPMC had “totally missed the mark”. UPMC supporters rightfully pointed out that food banks met employees’ needs just as effectively as wages – even UPMC’s executives would just as happily take their wages in green beans as they would in greenbacks. And as a gesture of good faith showing this was true, UPMC’s executives did no such thing.

More notoriously and most recently, UPMC has encountered trouble from its meddling nurses. Though the two parties had long been in contract negotiations, its nurses had been making ridiculous suggestions like “upping the nurse to patient ratio” or “having shorter shifts” – all supposedly so that nurses would be “better staffed and better able to treat their patients”. UPMC’s lawyers were forced to walk out of several negotiations when it was clear that the nurses were refusing to be productive and instead producing gag contracts that would in no way profit UPMC. Of course, nurses never know when to quit joking; weeks later, they began clowning around again with “protest” in the form of a day-long strike. UPMC kept its cool through the ordeal and chose the moral high ground by hiring temporary nurses to take their place. And though the price of 1.6 million for temps was much steeper than giving in to the nurses’ concessions, the medical institution’s point had been proven: “Fuck you, nurses.”

All in all, UPMC has had a rough couple of years. Whether from ungrateful minimum wagers or dastardly nurses, UPMC has been beset on all sides by employees who simply don’t know how to stop existing. Won’t you come down and show some support for your friendly University of Pittsburgh Medical Center? Join UPMC as it marches in force against its workers on March 3rd from 9 AM onwards, downtown at the USX Tower, 600 Grant St.

The Kansas House recently passed a bill granting both federal and private employees the right to refuse services to same-sex couples on the grounds of religious freedom. For some reason, many saw this as an attack on LGBT individuals in the state, particularly since this means gay couples would be dependent on the discretion of individual federal employees involved to receive benefits granted automatically to any straight couple. But, as the bill’s staunchest supporter, Kansas State Representative Charles Macheers reassured the House last week, it is actually designed to prevent discrimination, by allowing people free rein to discriminate.readme will now present the following quote without any alteration whatsoever, because holy fuck we don’t even. “Discrimination is horrible,” Macheers told his fellow representatives. “It’s hurtful…It has no place in civilized society, and that’s precisely why we’re moving this bill.” That…that is the sort of willfully blind hypocrisy that deserves the slowest of slow claps. Satire is over forever, folks. Nothing we ever say can top this.When Macheers talks about the horrors of ‘discrimination’, he is, of course, referring to the discrimination religious people face for holding views that were “unpopular”. Okay, homophobes, it occurs to readme that you may be suffering under a few misconceptions here. You see, people’s distaste for your beliefs is not some arbitrary thing. It’s not like we all got together one day and decided we were going to gang up on religious homophobes just because they smelled kind of funny and corner them in the bathroom and call them names until they were curled up on the floor sobbing about how they will be a satire paper one day, dammit, and everybody’ll love me and think I’m funny and…uh, sorry, where was I? Oh, yeah: we don’t like homophobia because it pushes the belief that certain people are less worthy of basic human rights like love and marriage and even sometimes safety than others, and that’s fucking dangerous. It has nothing to do with whether or not it’s ‘popular’.Ultimately, much of the controversy surrounding the bill comes from confusion about what it actually does. Ostensibly, all does is protect employees working in marriage-specific industries from having to contribute in even the slightest way to the union of two loving individuals of the same gender. However, some legal analysts worry that vague wording used in the bill could allow employees to refuse any service that violates their views on marriage. Macheers felt these fears were unfounded, saying that, “We disagree on that. That’s not what it said.” Thankfully, the way individual lawmakers and judges choose to interpret a poorly-worded bill is entirely determined by whether or not Rep. Macheers disagrees with their interpretation, or this bill would be extremely problematic.Now, for the bill to become law, it must first be passed by the Kansas State Senate. According to Senate President Susan Wagle, it stands very little chance. “My members don’t condone discrimination,” she said, “I believe a majority of my caucus will not support the bill.” Macheers, however, is firm in his belief that the bill discriminates against no one. “It just gives a measure of protection on both sides of the [gay marriage] issue,” he said. “It strikes a balance.” Exactly, you guys. Civil rights issues are all about balance and compromise. If you pass a measure help the oppressed, you have to give something of equal value to the oppressors. That’s how we all become equal, together: by not changing a goddamn thing.